WebForms Vs WindowsForms

9 Comments

• These two are also part of the answer:
  
  
  
  d) The ASP.NET forums have been running longer than the Windows Forms forums
  
  e) The ASP.NET team spend more time hanging out there so people know that it's a good place to ask questions
  
  
  
  But it's still an interesting question!
  

• too many places to find....
  
  
  
  www.asp.net
  
  www.gotdotnet.com
  
  www.windowsforms.net
  
  msdn.microsoft.com
  
  weblogs.asp.net
  
  
  
  all are good but often each has no link to the others....
  
  
  
  so when I go to g-d-n I don't even know that winforms-net is out there...
  
  while there are good reasons for some of the domains I would like to see them cross-link a lot more and for MS to look at some degree of merging them
  
  
  
  say:
  
  
  
  www.dotnet.net
  
  windowsforms.dotnet.net
  
  webforms.dotnet.net
  
  gotdotnet.dotnet.net
  
  asp.dotnet.net
  
  
  
  so that dotnet.net would be a central site that could have pointers to all of them....
  
  and perhaps a way to search all of them for stuff??
  
  

• dude, the fact that this site is called weblogs.ASP.net, and that a lot of people perceive this as being *the* .NET site hasa lot to do with it as well.
  

• I Believe that the reason is different, and has to do with the world as we knew it before .net came along.
  
  
  
  At the time, classic ASP was much easier to learn than programming for windows. Moreover, it was considered the "next step" after learning HTML (and even my 16-year-old sister knows a bit HTML :)). Naturally, the majority of classic ASP moved to ASP.NET. Add that to the fact that www.asp.net exists longer than www.windowsforms.net.
  

• Agree with the age argument: but it seems that there aren't many webpages and magazine articles (or even magazine ads?) that reference the winforms portal. Looks like the emphasis on webform app development has not only been around longer, but has much more people and time dedicated towards it. I second the motion to have a "overall" dotnet.net portal that can help to level the playing field between the two...and many other portals, like gotdotnet. I hope that with Whidbey, and a renewed emphasis on Smart Client app development, that there can be some realignment of priority towards "talking up" the winforms portal.
  

• I believe that Tim Sneath and Thomas Freudenberg have the three key reasons.. with the addition that you can do a LOT with developing a .net component and not tie it to WinForms or WebForms... A lot of advice on the asp.net forums can be applied to general .net component programming.. especially the current hot topics of persistence layers and O/R mappers
  

• Umm, if you think that the majority is moving to the web, you better get your scuba gear on because you are going to get swamped by the smart client wave that is moving away from the web...
  

• Another possibility is that the .NET framework is not installed by default on the end-user computers, therefore there are less windows forms developers.
  

• ASP.net has more traffic because it has been around longer, has more contributions due to the whole "web application" craze, and involves many more (somewhat disconnected) base technologies (html, css, javascript, .net, etc...) , therefore generating more questions as programmers grapple with learning and managing all of them.
  
  The sooner the webform as we know it dies, the better.